Pepa left Czechoslovakia before I did.
Tag Archives: MIT
MIT
In the spring of 1969 I was overwhelmed with dealing with my mother’s and sister’s immigration problems and could not keep up with taking 4 subjects at Lincoln College at the same time. I could not afford to fail any of them, since I was required to submit my report cards to the Selective Service board and a failure would have ended my student deferment immediately. So I made the decision to stop night school and instead look seriously at becoming a full-time university student. After discussing it with Jeanne and with my mother and sister, I started applying.
The Road to the Shell Station
In the fall of 1970 I realized I had to start making money. MIT was too great a financial burden to continue, and I was 27 years old and no longer subject to the draft. The engineering job market was not strong — there was a mild recession and it was not easy to find work in the computer industry — so I started researching going into business instead.
Looking for Work
While I was still running the station I had wanted to buy a computer to improve the business — not just for bookkeeping, but to track car maintenance services by time and mileage, send reminders to customers when an oil change or tuneup was due, and build the kind of systematic customer relationship that would grow the business over time. I did buy an address-making machine and tried to build a manual file system to do some of this, but it was slow and labor-intensive. Any computer, even the smallest PDP-11, was too expensive at the time.
Lamar’s Business Schemes
Before I found the programming job there was another business I was reluctantly drawn into considering, and it started with a customer named Lamar.
How I Approached Programming
From the beginning I wanted to do application programming because I felt my business experience from running the gas station gave me something most programmers did not have — a real understanding of how businesses actually worked and what they needed from software. That was where my interest was and where I thought I could contribute most.